The whole story of how I ended up here in Chandler, Arizona, alone and crying over the death of my mother just seems too long to tell in my current condition.  I feel so tired.  I was okay for a few weeks but I'm not so okay anymore.  I just want to sleep and cry.

We don't really live in Arizona by choice and, after experiencing only one summer here, we question the sanity of anyone who does.  My husband's company is moving us to China next year and Arizona is a mandatory layover.   The heat was bad for us; it has a very confining effect. But the separation from dear friends in California has been the greatest hardship.  And now that I am grieving the loss of my mother, that hardship is all the more difficult to bear.

We are moving to China by choice.  In the summer of 2007, my husband came home laughing about the fact that his Silicon Valley job was obviously on the chopping block and that some internal company recruiter had swung through town touting jobs in China.  Yes,  training the very people who will replace you, though the story is more complex than that.  We chuckled our cynical "life sucks" chuckles and then seemingly simultaneously had the same thought: "Why the hell not?"  Plan A at that time was to wait for the inevitable ax to fall on my husband's neck and then to relocate to our previous home of Raleigh, NC, a place we both love and where we still have many wonderful friends.  Compared to taking on a whole new country and a whole new language, returning to Raleigh felt a bit like beating a retreat.  We decided to delay the inevitable retreat, at least for a while, by spending 2 to 3 years in China.

 It is now the autumn of 2008 and we've only spent 6 days on Chinese soil thus far, but we are moving to China at some point.  Really.  Unless, of course, the fact that the whole world has turned upside down in the last month changes the plan all over again.

 Mama was born during the Great Depression and died just before our current crisis really took off.  She led a charmed life in many ways.  The final decade was rough for her.  Between my brother's drug addiction and her rheumatoid arthritis she endured a lot of pain.  I comfort myself knowing that her pain is over. I know that wondering what might have been is a pointless exercise in self-torture.  I've avoided that path for now.

 But I do mope around the house, occasionally screaming about how much I wish I could talk to my Mama.   I'm working very hard to maintain at least some level of normalcy.  And that's why I will end this post now and go get the kids and take them to the Y for swim lessons.